Gremlin Graphics revived as a heritage label

Gremlin Graphics is coming back, not as a mini console full of ROMs but as a working label. Allan Turvey, who runs the homebrew publisher Midnight Brew, has partnered with Gremlin co-founder Ian Stewart to launch Gremlin Graphics Classics, a heritage imprint built around the Sheffield studio’s 8-bit years. It launches this October at CRASH Live, where Stewart will appear alongside Gremlin veterans Peter Harrap, Tony Crowther, and Shaun Hollingworth.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the games might. Gremlin started in 1984, founded by Stewart and Kevin Norburn out of a small Sheffield software shop called Just Micro, and made its reputation on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum with the Monty Mole series, Thing on a Spring, Bounder, and Jack the Nipper. It carried into the ’90s with Zool and the Actua Soccer games under the Gremlin Interactive banner before Infogrames bought the company in 1999, renamed it Infogrames Sheffield House, and closed it in 2003.

The label’s first releases set the tone. There’s a retrospective art book, Gremlin Graphics Classics Volume One: The ZX Spectrum, through Fusion Retro Books, with a Commodore 64 volume to follow next year. There’s also a physical deluxe edition of Dreamtime Monty, billed as the first official Monty Mole adventure in over 30 years, built for the Spectrum NEXT by Rusty Pixels and the Spectrum Next team. The partner list reads like a who’s who of British 8-bit preservation: Games That Weren’t, The Gremlin Archive, the people behind the Spectrum NEXT and Mega65, and the CRASH and ZZAP! crews.

Turvey’s framing is the part worth holding onto. “We didn’t want to simply revisit the past for nostalgia’s sake,” he told Time Extension, describing a plan to restore Gremlin’s history and support new creative projects. That’s the difference between preserving a catalogue and embalming it. Get this one right and it’s a template other dormant labels should copy.